Popular commentators as well as professional economists-see, for example, Keynes (1936, pp. 154-155)-have long entertained the idea that movements in stock prices can involve "bubbles"-that is, psychologically based responses to extraneous factors. More recently, theorists using the assumption of rational expectations have analyzed formally the formation of asset prices, their incorporation of market fundamentals, and the possible influence of factors that are not part of market fundamentals. In an earlier paper-Diba and Grossman (1985)-we develop a general theoretical case, summarized briefly below, against the existence of rational bubbles. The present paper reports complementary empirical evidence that fluctuations in American stock prices do not incorporate rational bubbles.

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The fiscal theory of price determination suggests that if primary surpluses evolve independently of government debt, the equilibrium price level "jumps" to assure fiscal solvency. In this non-Ricardian regime, fiscal policy--not monetary policy--provides the nominal anchor. Alternatively, in a Ricardian regime, primary surpluses are expected to respond to debt in a way that assures fiscal solvency, and the price level is determined in conventional ways. This paper argues that Ricardian regimes are as theoretically plausible as non-Ricardian regimes, and provide a more plausible interpretation of certain aspects of the postwar U.S. data than do non-Ricardian regimes.

The Balassa-Samuelson model, which explains real exchange rate movements in terms of sectoral productivities, rests on two components. First, for a class of technologies including Cobb-Douglas, the model implies that the relative price of nontraded goods in each country should reflect the relative productivity of labor in the traded and nontraded goods sectors. Second, the model assumes that purchasing power parity holds for traded goods in the long-run. We test each of these implications using data from a panel of OECD countries. Our results suggest that the first of these two fits the data quite well. In the long run, relative prices generally reflect relative labor productivities. The evidence on purchasing power parity in traded goods is considerably less favorable. When we look at US dollar exchange rates, PPP does not appear to hold for traded goods, even in the long run. On the other hand, when we look at DM exchange rates purchasing power parity appears to be a somewhat better characterization of traded goods prices.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may University of Bern Georgetown UniversityMay 2011 AbstractThe Great Recession, and the fiscal response to it, has revived interest in the size of fiscal multipliers. Standard business cycle models have difficulties generating multipliers greater than one. And they also fail to produce any significant asymmetry in the size of the multipliers over the business cycle. In this paper we employ a variant of the Curdia-Woodford model of costly financial intermediation to show that fiscal multipliers are strongly countercyclical. In particular, they can take values exceeding two during recessions, declining to values below one during expansions.JEL class: E32, E62, H3